


untangle

by towardsmorning



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Community: tfa_kink, Eldritch, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 23:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5805292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/towardsmorning/pseuds/towardsmorning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luke goes looking for the lost Jedi temple. He doesn't find his way back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	untangle

**Author's Note:**

> Devaron is a reference to the YA novel "Weapon of a Jedi", where Luke goes to train in an abandoned Jedi temple, if people haven't read it.
> 
> The prompt on the TFA kink meme was for horror, where Luke hasn't been away willingly. I interpreted that kind of loosely. This is a really weird way for me to break my fic hiatus, but... I have very specific tastes, so sue me.

He had found what he came for, was the real kicker.

*

The island had sung out to him with the Force. It was undeniable, a hot-spot in the middle of a sparkling ocean; except that the closer his tiny ship had gotten the more that resonance had hurt, pricking behind his eyes as he landed. But Luke had been desperate. Pain could be put aside in favour of his search- if he turned tail and fled then his pile of failures would only continue to mount. There was nowhere else the first temple could be, and he couldn't think of anything left to try but to see if it contained anything of use.

Yoda, Obi-Wan, his father- they had all taught him as much as they knew about what it meant for his nephew to fall. Without anything more to give him, they had faded away. And his searches over the years to find whatever scraps of the old order remained had left him poorly prepared for this; _you can't fight what you don't know_ , his sister had told him, when he went to try and make things right with her.

So Luke landed, and when he sat down on the green ground and pressed a hand to the soil, he felt the singing pass through him, and knew he had to stay. He had found what he had come for.

The first night, he slept in his ship. It rained, and he was too tired to look for shelter, and if he was entirely honest with himself the metal between him and the island made him feel safer. Even so, he lay awake for a long time, staring out the cockpit into the perfect blackness beyond and straining his ears.

*

Three nights in, he thought he had explored the whole island. He thought. It was difficult to be sure. Sometimes Luke swore he had gotten turned around somehow, only to regain his bearings. He attributed this to the uniformity of his surroundings, and tried not to dwell too much on their smallness and the improbability of getting lost with such clear views.

There were steps- there were walls- there were signs that once, people lived here. There were birds that never seem to land. There was not, so far as he had found, any sign of a temple.

He thought- _has it been destroyed?_ But the steps were in good condition, and if there were walls remaining, surely there would at least be ruins.

 _Could it be underground?_ But the steps led upwards, and none of the caves seemed to go more than thirty feet back.

His inability to solve the puzzle brought a little of his old impatience back- and it had to be a puzzle, he thought. If nothing else, it seemed like the kind of thing the Jedi would have done. The temple on Devaron had been less obtuse, perhaps, but the principle applied. If Luke could just find the right place to go, the right place to look, the right place to-

He grit his teeth and let out a held breath between them. No secret worth keeping would be easy to find, and he supposed that was for the best. At the very least it seemed increasingly unlikely anyone else had gotten here before him. _Now think,_ he told himself, _how do Jedi hide things?_ With the Force, naturally. The trouble was that the incessant, constant ring of it was so strong over the island that he couldn't make anything out. When exploring he had cast about, looking for a place his mind snagged or caught; but all that had come back was an indistinguishable mass.

It would just take time. No need to be ready to leave at a moment's notice; he moved his scant things out of his ship and into a nearby cave.

*

When he woke the next morning, he cracked his neck and shoulders where they'd cramped on the hard ground, and the heaviness in his skull weighed him down all day.

*

Over time, he quelled his own impatience and forced himself into long hours of meditation. He picked through the singing and came to vomiting; he steadied his breathing and tried again. It got easier. Not more pleasant, but easier. Each time he settled down, the threads he sorted through echoed louder and more clearly in his head, distinct, changing. It still wasn't a good idea to examine them for too long at once. He still ached from the cold ground, and his head felt heavy, but perhaps he was getting somewhere.

At night, he still stared out at the darkness and listened. Not quite meditation. At times he felt like he was waiting for someone to come tell him- but none of his guides had shown themselves here. He told himself it didn't bother him, that they had no knowledge to give, that there was no reason to believe they knew any more about this place than he did. Certainly the little information he had found from before the Order's fall indicated this island had been lost long ago.

Sometimes he pushed his circular thoughts aside and just let the pricking behind his eyes take over until he fell asleep. At this stage, he'd take any distraction.

His dreams weren't full of the island so much as the island intruded on them; perfectly normal nightmares began to fall apart to the rhythm of the island. It surrounded him entirely, every moment, awake and asleep. And still, he didn't know where to start looking. Only that he couldn't stop.

*

"The will of the force," Luke had heard Obi-Wan say before. He couldn't feel any will here, no guiding thread to follow. Just an erratic beat he had begun to feel pulsing at the nape of his neck when he really focused on it.

*

He cast out for Leia one day and couldn't find her. Just trying made the space between his ears screech at him, a feedback loop of noise that drowned out the world. Against his better judgement he had tried again, and this time the pain had knocked him out, and he hadn't come to until the sun had begun to set. The world away from this island may as well have been a void for all he can sense it.

His sister might have been dead. His sister might have been gone, forever, and he would have had no clue. He'd never have noticed. He couldn't even recall how long it had taken him to think of checking in on her; his thoughts were fighting for space these days, between the pain and the pulsing and the song. He tried to hold the thought, suddenly struck with panic that it could disappear- _Leia, Leia, Leia._ She was, deep down, the reason he had come. Even more than his own shame and guilt he held onto a need to make things right for her.

He told himself that Leia was in fact the reason he couldn't leave, and in all the commotion didn't even have much energy to disbelieve it.

*

Luke didn't care, by that point, about the physical peculiarities of the temple. He didn't need the ruins or the books he hoped to find or any other sign of life. He thought he grasped at least a little of the truth- that the first Jedi temple had not really been about such things. Perhaps they had never existed at all- and then he was swept away again, and the thought lay forgotten.

*

It had taken such a long time. His head was still so heavy, and he thought the thing inside it was starting to look at what it would not let him reach. _The force is everywhere,_ each of his mentors had told him at one point or another. He wasn't so sure he wanted to risk helping it along. He wasn't so sure the Jedi whose path he had followed here hadn't felt the same. He wasn't sure of very much at all, these days.

*

When the girl arrived, Luke told her to leave, and only then did he realise he never once thought he could do that himself.

**Author's Note:**

> Look, the force COULD be an eldritch horror. I mean, it's not TOTALLY impossible. ...It's at least as reasonable as thinking Jar-Jar Binks is a sith lord, at _least._
> 
> Please be kind about the tenses, hah. I struggle to keep them straight sometimes, I'm working on it.


End file.
